The following correction was printed in the Guardian's Corrections and clarifications column, Friday May 25 2007

Steven Spielberg's office has asked us to point out that he had filmed in London prior to shooting the film Munich, contrary to the assertion made in the article below. Empire of the Sun and Hook contained scenes shot in the capital.

Until recently, a ritual stage in the publicity campaign for the next James Bond film would have been the announcement of the foreign locations to be used. Bond movies were a sort of geography lesson, introducing viewers to the Caribbean or the Far East. But a combination of mass air travel and 24-hour visual media have removed the usefulness of movies as a super-postcard. As if conceding defeat, Casino Royale climaxes in one of the most visually plundered places in the world: Venice.

London ought to bring the same problem of ocular fatigue. Even as accomplished a director as Steven Spielberg, when he finally came to film the English capital for the first time in a sequence for the film Munich, struggled to get beyond red buses and rain-wet pavements. Woody Allen, whose movie Manhattan so captured that city that a generation of tourists had deja vu when they walked down Fifth Avenue, seemed to look at the UK's equivalent addresses with a nervous squint, dully ticking off a list of trendy locations - the Millennium Bridge, the Tate, the Gherkin - in Match Point and Scoop.

But suddenly my eyes have been opened. Several recent movies and a current television series are showing us a city that might be called, to use the map-making methods of the early settlers of North America, New London.

By filming in summer nights and taking advantage of the digital possibilities, the horror movie 28 Weeks Later (which opens today) shows the city as it has never been seen before - by making it a city that has no one left to see it: the plot dictates that a virus has wiped out almost the entire UK population.

The shots of empty suburban streets, abandoned rail tracks and silent skies are terribly unnerving, like seeing an old friend wasted by illness. A scene at Wembley stadium where the grass is uncut and the seats untouched could invite cheap jokes about building delays, but instead it makes us look afresh at a hackneyed landmark, seeing the city as it appears in the dreams of terrorists.

This mapping of New London began last year with another thriller about a falling UK population, Children of Men. Default locations - Oxford Street, Piccadilly Circus, tube stations, coffee bars - were transformed by tight angles and details of squalor and damage. While a director can sometimes visually refresh a city by being first to new parts - as Anthony Minghella does impressively with the redeveloped King's Cross in Breaking and Entering - what's startling about the two horror movies is that they make familiar places strange.

It helps in this respect that, while both 28 Weeks Later and Children of Men are to some extent science fiction, they avoid the common assumption that the future will tend towards aluminium surfaces and space travel. In both films, civilisation goes backwards: their visual template seems to have been the public service strikes of the 1970s, in garbage piled high and transport collapsed.

But another clear contribution to the sense of visual newness is that both movies were made by outsiders: the Spanish director Juan Carlos Fresnadillo and the Mexican film-maker Alfonso Cuarón respectively. For someone unfamiliar with a city, the place will always be a discomfort zone, a focus of frightening or enlightening visual surprises, in a way that it can never be for a resident. In the same way, the French director Patrice Chéreau brings an ominous atmosphere to everyday London in the film Intimacy.

Yet while all these cinematic reimaginings of the city are dystopias, consolation for Londoners that the place can still be viewed as a utopia comes from an unexpected source: Alan Sugar's The Apprentice. Although promoted as a masterclass in business practice, and generally viewed as a psychological soap opera, the series is perhaps most notable for its enthusiastic depiction of the sights to be seen in the capital.

While Fresnadillo and Cuarón make London look terrifying by stripping away the cars and people and zooming in on the scarred streets, the directors of The Apprentice fly high, swooping across glittering tableaux of ancient spires and hi-tech skyscrapers, with the busy metropolis glimpsed below. As in the movies, these views make even a daily commuter feel like a tourist.

The late Canadian writer Robertson Davies, an admirer of Dickens, gloomily concluded towards the end of his life that one of his mentor's greatest gifts - the visceral description of landscape - had become pointless for modern novelists. The contemporary audience carried such a show reel of images in their heads that all an author had to do was write "New York" and his readers saw Manhattan. I would have felt a similar hopelessness about showing cities on film or television - until I saw New London.